Last night at rehearsal, one of the trombone players shared a story from an event he played at last weekend where there were several Congressional Medal of Honor winners. At his table was a Viet Nam era corpsman who told the story of how he had thrown one grenade out of a bunker and then dove on top of a second grenade. When it didn't go off, he threw it out of the bunker only to have it go off seconds later. The trombone player's response was something along the line of "I like to think I would do the same thing but I just don't know."
Rick Warren says that life is "Temporary, a Test and a Trust". I like to think of the "Test" of life as more of a "blood test" rather than a final or mid-term exam...not to see how much you know, but rather what you are made of. A thought I had after hearing the corpman's story was "how do you explain your actions AFTER the fact, when people ask you 'what were you thinking?' While I would never compare MY story to the corpman's story, I can relate to him in a most modest way because some years ago I tried to stop a shoplifter at Radio Shack. After he escaped, the manager AND the police interviewed me with questions all tainted with the tone "what were you thinking?" At the time I couldn't help but hearing the words of Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) in Patriot Games when he explained why he rescued a British Aristocrat from IRA terrorists with, "He pissed me off". Some things just seem like a good idea at the time.
